COMIC: Towards A Compact Image Captioning Model with Attention

Recent works in image captioning have shown very promising raw performance. However, we realize that most of these encoder-decoder style networks with attention do not scale naturally to large vocabulary size, making them difficult to be deployed on embedded system with limited hardware resources. This is because the size of word and output embedding matrices grow proportionally with the size of vocabulary, adversely affecting the compactness of these networks. To address this limitation, this paper introduces a brand new idea in the domain of image captioning. That is, we tackle the problem of compactness of image captioning models which is hitherto unexplored. We showed that, our proposed model, named COMIC for COMpact Image Captioning, achieves comparable results in five common evaluation metrics with state-of-the-art approaches on both MS-COCO and InstaPIC-1.1M datasets despite having an embedding vocabulary size that is 39x - 99x smaller. The source code and models are available at: https://github.com/jiahuei/COMIC-Compact-Image-Captioning-with-AttentionComment: Added source code link and new results in Table

Attentive Tensor Product Learning

This paper proposes a new architecture - Attentive Tensor Product Learning (ATPL) - to represent grammatical structures in deep learning models. ATPL is a new architecture to bridge this gap by exploiting Tensor Product Representations (TPR), a structured neural-symbolic model developed in cognitive science, aiming to integrate deep learning with explicit language structures and rules. The key ideas of ATPL are: 1) unsupervised learning of role-unbinding vectors of words via TPR-based deep neural network; 2) employing attention modules to compute TPR; and 3) integration of TPR with typical deep learning architectures including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Feedforward Neural Network (FFNN). The novelty of our approach lies in its ability to extract the grammatical structure of a sentence by using role-unbinding vectors, which are obtained in an unsupervised manner. This ATPL approach is applied to 1) image captioning, 2) part of speech (POS) tagging, and 3) constituency parsing of a sentence. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach

Image Captioning and Classification of Dangerous Situations

Current robot platforms are being employed to collaborate with humans in a wide range of domestic and industrial tasks. These environments require autonomous systems that are able to classify and communicate anomalous situations such as fires, injured persons, car accidents; or generally, any potentially dangerous situation for humans. In this paper we introduce an anomaly detection dataset for the purpose of robot applications as well as the design and implementation of a deep learning architecture that classifies and describes dangerous situations using only a single image as input. We report a classification accuracy of 97 % and METEOR score of 16.2. We will make the dataset publicly available after this paper is accepted

From Deterministic to Generative: Multi-Modal Stochastic RNNs for Video Captioning

Video captioning in essential is a complex natural process, which is affected by various uncertainties stemming from video content, subjective judgment, etc. In this paper we build on the recent progress in using encoder-decoder framework for video captioning and address what we find to be a critical deficiency of the existing methods, that most of the decoders propagate deterministic hidden states. Such complex uncertainty cannot be modeled efficiently by the deterministic models. In this paper, we propose a generative approach, referred to as multi-modal stochastic RNNs networks (MS-RNN), which models the uncertainty observed in the data using latent stochastic variables. Therefore, MS-RNN can improve the performance of video captioning, and generate multiple sentences to describe a video considering different random factors. Specifically, a multi-modal LSTM (M-LSTM) is first proposed to interact with both visual and textual features to capture a high-level representation. Then, a backward stochastic LSTM (S-LSTM) is proposed to support uncertainty propagation by introducing latent variables. Experimental results on the challenging datasets MSVD and MSR-VTT show that our proposed MS-RNN approach outperforms the state-of-the-art video captioning benchmarks

A Neural, Interactive-predictive System for Multimodal Sequence to Sequence Tasks

We present a demonstration of a neural interactive-predictive system for tackling multimodal sequence to sequence tasks. The system generates text predictions to different sequence to sequence tasks: machine translation, image and video captioning. These predictions are revised by a human agent, who introduces corrections in the form of characters. The system reacts to each correction, providing alternative hypotheses, compelling with the feedback provided by the user. The final objective is to reduce the human effort required during this correction process. This system is implemented following a client-server architecture. For accessing the system, we developed a website, which communicates with the neural model, hosted in a local server. From this website, the different tasks can be tackled following the interactive-predictive framework. We open-source all the code developed for building this system. The demonstration in hosted in http://casmacat.prhlt.upv.es/interactive-seq2seq.Comment: ACL 2019 - System demonstration

STAIR Captions: Constructing a Large-Scale Japanese Image Caption Dataset

In recent years, automatic generation of image descriptions (captions), that is, image captioning, has attracted a great deal of attention. In this paper, we particularly consider generating Japanese captions for images. Since most available caption datasets have been constructed for English language, there are few datasets for Japanese. To tackle this problem, we construct a large-scale Japanese image caption dataset based on images from MS-COCO, which is called STAIR Captions. STAIR Captions consists of 820,310 Japanese captions for 164,062 images. In the experiment, we show that a neural network trained using STAIR Captions can generate more natural and better Japanese captions, compared to those generated using English-Japanese machine translation after generating English captions.Comment: Accepted as ACL2017 short paper. 5 page

Towards Accountable AI: Hybrid Human-Machine Analyses for Characterizing System Failure

As machine learning systems move from computer-science laboratories into the open world, their accountability becomes a high priority problem. Accountability requires deep understanding of system behavior and its failures. Current evaluation methods such as single-score error metrics and confusion matrices provide aggregate views of system performance that hide important shortcomings. Understanding details about failures is important for identifying pathways for refinement, communicating the reliability of systems in different settings, and for specifying appropriate human oversight and engagement. Characterization of failures and shortcomings is particularly complex for systems composed of multiple machine learned components. For such systems, existing evaluation methods have limited expressiveness in describing and explaining the relationship among input content, the internal states of system components, and final output quality. We present Pandora, a set of hybrid human-machine methods and tools for describing and explaining system failures. Pandora leverages both human and system-generated observations to summarize conditions of system malfunction with respect to the input content and system architecture. We share results of a case study with a machine learning pipeline for image captioning that show how detailed performance views can be beneficial for analysis and debugging

NMTPY: A Flexible Toolkit for Advanced Neural Machine Translation Systems

In this paper, we present nmtpy, a flexible Python toolkit based on Theano for training Neural Machine Translation and other neural sequence-to-sequence architectures. nmtpy decouples the specification of a network from the training and inference utilities to simplify the addition of a new architecture and reduce the amount of boilerplate code to be written. nmtpy has been used for LIUM's top-ranked submissions to WMT Multimodal Machine Translation and News Translation tasks in 2016 and 2017.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure